I’ve got a lot of questions about my life, my past and my personality recently, so that I’ve decided to share some stories with you. Not because I’d like to show you how ‘good’ I am but to show you: it’s possible to change your life if you really want it.
So, let me start with the years at the university.
I’ve made my high school in a small Hungarian town’s small high school, with special classes on Math and Physics. My parents were very poor and the school was very small and not too good, but I had some VERY good teachers there who I will be grateful in my whole life. They were supporting me in my ‘crazy’ computer mania, they let me in to the computer room whenever I wanted, they gave me a lot of books (don’t forget: by that time we hadn’t have Internet yet), etc. I was the very first student in the school who had email address but couldn’t use that as hadn’t have anybody with email address around me yet. I made a lot of cool programs there, including a German-Hungarian dictionary with more than 26,000 words, some e-learning programs for the subjects I didn’t like (history, for example), chat program over a Norton server with one of my friends (who was a computer fan too, of course), etc.
I’ve had a lot of fun there.
Then I had to decide what’s next. For me, it was obvious to choose the best university in the country, so that applied to the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE) and I’ve got accepted immediately. It was one of the biggest wonder in my life, I could leave the small town and moved to Budapest! Wow…
But after a few months, my parents realized they couldn’t afford my education. After the biggest wonder the darkest days came.
Then I made the decision to start working instead of leaving the school. I didn’t left my class but started to work as a developer at Graphisoft in parallel.
I have had mixed feelings about this.
First, it was amazing to work for such a great company. At the beginning I had to work with GDL, ArchiCad’s Graphical Description Language – can you imagine what a fun to write a code that finally draws the bridges of Budapest? My favorite one is still the Elisabeth Bridge because of its simply math model and beauty. Then, I had to improve GDL. You know, programming the framework for a program language. Sounds good, right?
Yes, it was an amazing job, amazing time and I could learn a lot.
But at the same time, you know, I still was a student, had to learn (sometimes should have learn much more…), and yes, as every typical student I wanted to socialize much more. While my friends went out, I was working to be able to stay at the university. While definitely learned a lot, like time management, self-discipline, working hard, etc., it was a hard, very hard time of my life.
When .NET came out, I’ve been working for a T-System company as a developer and got the task to ‘explore’ the new language and framework. Then, I’ve got a kind of new ‘research’ task: me and two of my colleagues had to make a .NET forms application that was able to make operations on Exchange public folders. Operations, like Search. With the API of something that was called “Tahoe”…
It was my very first meeting with SharePoint. I didn’t know what was this, I didn’t even know it had any UI, the only thing I new there was an API that had Search functions and I had to drive it to be able to work over my Exchange public folders…
A few months later, my managers decided to give me a new project. You know, like “you already know SharePoint”… Then one more, one more, one more SharePoint project even after some company changes again, but I always have got bigger and bigger tasks, projects so I had to explore the product more and more. But still, everybody though I knew SharePoint even before I knew about that…
By the time I finished my studies as M.Sc. of Computer Sciences I was working as a software architect and had my own SharePoint classes in a training center. I still didn’t know I wanted to focus on SharePoint, but SharePoint wanted me way too much…